


your eyes on the firmament

by magdaliny



Series: quiet americans [3]
Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Gen, Love is complicated, and other difficult truths, history is messy
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-09-27
Updated: 2017-09-27
Packaged: 2018-12-24 21:07:39
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,173
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12021018
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/magdaliny/pseuds/magdaliny
Summary: “Evening, ma'am,” he says.“Good evening, Captain,” she replies.





	your eyes on the firmament

### December 2016

An electron volt of light is 1.60e-19 joules of energy moving through the observable world. The way this may be measured is varied. The speed of light in a vacuum is 299,792,458 metres per second. In the year 1334, when the Black Death was first recorded in the Mongol-ruled lake province of Huguang, a photon was released from the star Polaris. It has henceforth taken six hundred and eighty-two years for the light to reach the eyes of sapient observers. It would have taken less time, in 1334, when all of the universe was closer together—when a different photon ended its journey against the face of a grieving Song woman just emerging from her home, rending her hair and wailing.

This is fantasy. In 1334, in Hubei, Chinese women may not have unanimously engaged in the same displays of performative grief that are beginning to die out in our times. Or perhaps they did, but this woman was Mongolian, not Song. Or perhaps they did, but the woman did not weep; perhaps she hated the man who died. Perhaps it was not even a man. It is, disappointingly, impossible to know. The photons do not care.

She is letting that distant light crash against her face when Captain Rogers joins her on the blanket. Although the current regional temperature of six degrees Celsius is historically warm for December, he is only wearing a loose shirt. He does not copy her prone position, but rather leans back against his hands a respectable distance away. He does not lie down with Gertrude or Evangeline or the children: only James. The Captain is very careful with his intimacies. She imagines the curve of his neck, his scapula moving beneath his skin.

“Evening, ma'am,” he says.

“Good evening, Captain,” she replies.

“Beautiful night.”

“Yes,” she says. “It is lovely.”

He is silent for some time. She does not know what he is thinking, or if he is thinking at all. He may only be listening to the breeze, the night insects, the scuff and respiration of small animals in the fields beyond the garden. She finds it easy to relax in his presence. The Doctor once called the Captain an unnatural creature, but he is not; he eats and he breathes. His senses are enhanced, but the pipistrelles in the hedgerows would consider him both blind and deaf. He was poured smoothly into his mould. He does not have the uncanny stillness of her charge, who was broken to fit.

“New York had a dim-out in '42,” he says, after four and a half minutes of silence. “They were worried all the light would silhouette ships in the Atlantic and make 'em easier to hit. We'd never seen anything like it—I mean, they'd banned night baseball in Ebbets Field, and _that_ was strange, but the dim-out was something else. All the cars had their lights covered, and the top half of buildings got cut off, and they turned out all the neon in Times Square and Coney Island. That was the first time I ever saw stars that weren't in a book.” He snorts. “Sounds silly, when I put it that way. Coulda just taken a train out of the city if I wanted to see them all that bad. It was neat, though, that first time. Seen plenty since then, but the novelty kind of hangs around.”

“Liberty's torch was not lit,” she says. He makes a muted sound she cannot interpret. “I was in France. The submarine pen in La Rochelle. They announced it on the wireless: _Ce soir, La Liberté a disparu_. Were you frightened?”

“By the blackout?” he asks. “No, not really. The war was pretty—I mean, it was already real close to home, by then. Why were you in France? You'd've only been—”

“Sixteen,” she says. She remembers little of it. Flashes and impressions. Only the taste of _topinambours_ ; the Doctor's clammy hand on her elbow. The long-haired children protesting in the cafés: boys in their drainpipe trousers and heavy shoes, girls with dark glasses and their heads uncovered. The false yellow stars on their jackets that read: _zazous_. The trains were running through the night in Paris, that spring.

“He was overseeing weapons installations,” she says. “The tesseract drives were interfering with the firing mechanisms when improperly shielded.”

She appreciates that she does not need to clarify who _he_ is. Captain Rogers, very softly, swears.

“Sorry,” he says, and then, “I'm sorry.”

The first apology is for him. The second apology is for her past, and therefore irrelevant.

“I grew up amongst soldiers, Captain,” she says. “I am not offended.”

She expects him to respond to that, but he does not. To her surprise, he lays down, stretching his legs. He is much larger than her. When she looks, she sees what she expects; his bare feet are over the edge of the blanket, settling in the frosty grass. His fingers are interwoven on his belly. He must know that she is looking at him, but he does not turn his head. He is looking at the sky.

“I guess J probably told you why he likes the stars,” Captain Rogers says. She knows that he eschews James's nickname and calls him this deliberately: J. The unadulterated tenth letter of the English alphabet, which was once not a letter at all. It was until the sixteenth century little more than a decorative iota, a typographical flourish, the consonantal _i_. Voiced, but never written. It suits a man who was once a ghost.

“Yes,” she says.

“So why d' _you_ like looking at them so much?”

“Consider the stars,” she says, in a voice that is not her own. “Among them there are no passions, no wars. They know neither love nor hatred. Did man but emulate the stars, would not his soul become clear and radiant, as they are? But man's spirit draws him like a moth to the ephemera of this world, and in their heat he is consumed entire.”

“Which philosopher said that?”

“It is,” she says, “From a contemporary fantasy novel.”

Captain Rogers has a lovely laugh.

“I am comforted by their indifference,” she says, when he stops. “They exist without insight. They are entirely without agency. They are incapable of cruelty. And yet they are the things in the universe most filled with life, from a scientific standpoint—or a poetic one. There has not been a single age of man in which we have not named them, or told stories about them.” She pauses. Captain Rogers, very kindly, does not interrupt. “There is a unit of energy called a foe, or sometimes a bethe. It is used only in measuring the energy released by a supernova, which is stupendous. The energy released by all the nuclear weapons ever tested is the most minuscule fraction of the energy released by an exploding star. Such things occur more than once per terrestrial second. In the face of that, my own miseries seem reduced in scale.”

“Not meaningless?” he asks.

“No,” she says. “We are the beast that makes meaning. I exist, therefore I may choose to see my existence as insignificant or miraculous. It seems to me that in the interests of personal happiness, there is only one logical conclusion. Are you familiar with the anthropic principle?”

“Yeah, I think so. I read it in an article one time, so I looked it up. It, um—it says that it's so unlikely that all the chips fell into place in the right way to produce life, so it must've been meant to be. Right?”

“Essentially,” she says. “I admit that many of the variations stray too far into teleology for my liking. Correlation is not causation. But the fact remains that we can observe the universe, and the universe can be observed. I do not believe that we are designed, but it pleases me to believe that we are essential. Perhaps without sapient observers, superposition would not be possible, and probability would never collapse into form. They,” she says, gesturing, “Remind me. That we are meant to live.”

“I like that,” says Captain Rogers, very quietly.

“But mainly,” she says, “I think that they are beautiful.”

The Captain does not respond, but this time he does so in a more pointed manner.

Curious, she asks, “Are you thinking that I should not be capable of appreciating beautiful things, given my history?”

“No,” he says. “No, sorry, I. I was thinking it might make you more sensitive to them. Actually.”

She sits up and turns to look at him. He allows it, without visible discomfort. She suspects that in the dark he is seeing a great deal more of her than she is of him, but she is not cataloguing his visible features.

It would be unnecessarily Byronic to claim that she does not understand love. She does: it is the affection one feels in the presence of another human being, or in special circumstances, a domestic animal. It is a beatific condition with manifold variation and expression, encompassing a wide range of emotion. Oftentimes it is expected, as between a parent and a child. It would be equally Byronic, and equally inaccurate, to claim that the Doctor did not love her, or that she did not love him. There must have been love, or she would have become a voiceless thing, a feral child, the storied mermaid forever doomed to wash against the shores of humanity without making port. And so she loves. She loves the children; how she loves the children. She loves Evangeline. She loves James. It might be said that she was designed to love James, but this does not signify. To not love him would be perverse.

But James and Captain Rogers love one another in a way she cannot understand. It is a naked, tangled thing, wrapped around their bones. For James, too, was designed to love, and this concerned her. Captain Rogers is a variable she could not account for. Though contemporaneous by birth, he is a much younger creature, and closer to the fire. She worried that his love was subjective, clinging to a framework that no longer existed, attached to the dead man James had been born from. She worried that his love for James was not entirely virtuous. It was possible that he did not fully comprehend James—or that what was done to him made him more human, not less.

She should have known.

She remembers only a little of Abraham Erskine. The Doctor had thought she would disturb others, as she disturbed the Doctor, and therefore he tried to keep them apart until the English spy took Abraham away, and many things changed, and such precautions were no longer necessary. Abraham was very kind, she remembers. She does not ordinarily consider kindliness to be an unequivocal compliment, but it was the case for him, because it ran deeper in him than mere politeness. He was a gentle monster; they had all been monsters, then. He believed that it was goodness, not strength, that was required to reform the world. He was a good doctor, and a better human being.

He would not have chosen, as his legacy, a man with less compassion than himself.

 _You understand_ , she wishes to say.

She offers her hand the way the Doctor taught her after the first procedure went wrong: _Like this_ , with his fingers together and his palm cupped, _Soft, like a lady, and say how-do-you-do, and for goodness sake don't stare_ ; she had asked, _Why_? and he had replied, _Then smile, at least, so you don't frighten people_ , and she had vowed never to move her lips again, unless it pleased her. Captain Rogers takes her hand in his much larger one, with a firm but conscientious grip. He reminds her of being very young, of toddling along beside a man who she once hoped she would never outgrow, holding on to his soft thumb and looking up, up, up. Then the Captain leans towards her with his eager, leopardine grace, and she feels very old indeed. And grateful, as she always does, in the presence of an extraordinary machine. She is very glad that there are marvels in this world that the Doctor has not made.

 _You understand_ , she wishes to say, but does not. _Forgive me_ , she might say, _I was jealous and afraid_ ; but such a statement is neither helpful nor efficient. She could say, _You have my blessing_ , but this would be redundant. _We will live for a very long time_ , she might say: _And I am glad to have met you at the beginning, when you are fresh and new and full of pain, and love, and starlight. There are 185.97 fluid ounces of blood in your body and everyone who has hurt him will one day die alone_. But she does not say any of those things.

She says, instead, “Thank you.”

And smiles.

**Author's Note:**

> Six more post- _Moment_ ficlets are in progress, and several unrelated stories, but I'm afraid I can't say for sure when those will go up, since I'm taking off on Saturday for my new home in the strange wilds of Nova Scotia. Should you be so inclined, think safe-travel thoughts in my direction! We'll be on the road about two weeks, and I'm keeping my fingers crossed that I'll manage lots of words on the way.
> 
> Thanks so much for reading, friends! <333


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